By and through the ballot alone. The ballot answers
questions. It says yes, or no. It declares
what principles shall rule; it says what laws
shall be made, it tells what taxes are to be
raised; it places men in office or lays their heads
low in the dust. It is the will of a man
embodied in that little piece of paper; it is the consent
of the governed.

Are women governed? Most certainly; they pay
taxes,—­they are held amenable to laws;
they are tried for crimes; they are fined, imprisoned,
hung. The government wields strong power over
them. Have they consented to this power of the
government? Have they a recognized right to the
ballot? Has their consent bean asked through their
votes? Have they had a voice in saying what taxes
shall be levied on their property,—­what
penalties they shall pay for crimes? No. They
are ruled without their consent. The first principles
of government are founded on the natural rights of
individuals; in order to secure the exercise
of these natural, individual rights our government
professed to be founded. Governments never created
a single right; rights did not come new-born into
the world with our revolutionary fathers. They
were men of middle age when they severed their connexion
with Great Britain, but that severance did not endow
them with a single new right. It was at that
time they first entered into the exercise of
their natural, individual rights. Neither our
Declaration, nor our Constitution created a single
right; they merely recognized certain rights as in
existence. They recognized those rights as human
rights,—­as inalienable rights,—­as
rights existing by virtue of common humanity.
Natural rights never change, but the power to perceive
these natural rights does change, and various nations
have had their own standard.

Three names, said to be the sweetest the world ever
knew, are mother, home, and heaven. There is
one still sweeter—­one for which men have
given up mother and home, and for which they have almost
sacrificed the hope of heaven; that word is LIBERTY.

When the fires of liberty began to creep through Europe
in the middle ages, at a time when hereditary monarchs
and the catholic church ruled the world, men placed
its safeguards in municipal corporations. The
idea of municipal corporations descended from Rome
to the rest of Europe, and “free cities”
became the germ of personal freedom. But a new
world was needed for the great experiment of individual
freedom. Macauley calls government an experimental
science and therefore a progressive science; history
shows this to be true. Liberty did not spring
“full armed” like Minerva from the head
of Jove. The liberty possessed by the world has
been gradually secured, and it was left for our country
first to incorporate in its foundation a recognition
of individual rights. A hundred years before